Art Cullen is a longtime newspaper editor in northwest Iowa. Cullen won a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper for his series on the agricultural pollution of Iowa's waterways.
In his new essay collection, 'Dear Marty, We Crapped in Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World,' the author examines how the corn/soybean monoculture in the Midwest has been a destructive force as farmers are now running massive operations that till every inch of tillable ground and that this leads to erosion that is carrying off millions of tons of topsoil into rivers that eventually drain into the Gulf of Mexico (remember that body of water?), where a massive dead zone has been created because all that runoff water is laden with fertilizer that the farmers of today are over-applying to their fields.
Cullen also takes a look at another huge agricultural industry in Iowa: hog production/pork processing, and reveals a shocking fact. The pork produced in Iowa is being exported in large quantities to China. Amazing, right? Perhaps you are wondering how that works since China stopped buying U.S. soybeans during this latest Trump trade imbroglio. How are they still buying all that pork? Well, according to Cullen, they already own all that pork. They just let the Iowans deal with all the nightmarish hog confinements and the resulting excess of manure. The Chinese own the largest U.S. pork processor, Smithfield. They own millions of Iowa piglets right from birth until they are sides of ham on ships bound for China. Who knew this?
This is a timely, I daresay, crucial book.
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